Hi mountain-addicted Freaks and high-altitude Speedies!
Last week Werner S. and me (Bernhard Gruber) we drove to Switzerland for doing some high mountains in the Wallis.
We hiked up on tuesday 3.8. in the afternoon from randa 1407m to the Domhütte 2940m in 03:10′.
We felt very good on this level and we had a nice view to the matterhorn and the weisshorn.
This hut is a small hut but you will find there only “real” mountaineers because the dom is a fair-minded mountain. that means you have no help by cablecars and you have a big way to get to the hut.
the dom is the highest mountain which is fully placed in switzerland.
on wednesday we stood up at 2:30 am with all the other mountaineers and had our breakfast. Bloddy Hell!
We managed to start at 03:30 and climbed over the festiglacier up to the festijoch. first we thought we will climb the festigrat but our physical and mental conditions were not ready for this ridge so we tried the normal way on the hoburg glacier. there were a lot of dangerous ice seracs. at 09:45 we came to our point of ‘”did not finished”. we had no more power for climbing the last 400m’s of height to the mountain top. we got out of breath because we had no good acclimatisation. i suffered from headaches. so we went down to the domhut. the next day was a rainy day, so we stay at the dom hut for relaxing and swaping mountain stories with other mountaineers like “gollner richie” from kleinreifling.
on this day we only did a acclimatisation tour near the hobergwächte.
we felt really better and better.
on friday 6th august we started at 03:15 our second trial and managed the dom in 05:45’. what a different feeling compared to the first trial. we could see all the 4000m mountains in wallis. the valley was covered in fog.
at the mountain top i put out my speedflyer gin yak out of my heavy bagback and flew down from the dom to randa. that’s 3070m of height altitude difference.
the starting was not the best because the left side got not opened fast. so i fell down a little bit. the flight was really great beside my heavy backback i had a lot of thermal upwinds over the hobergwächte and the the valley. so i had to do a lot of spirals to got down. i was at 10:00 am in randa. i drove to zermatt for coffee and some cookies. werner has to walk down by foot. he needed 5 hours ;))
thx for this wonderful amazing flight.
i will put the video from the flight asap.
Btw: we found a nice accommodation for mountaineers in randa, the Restaurant and Camping Hole in one. I can recommend every one to stay there for some nights!!
cya bernhard

6 responses to “Speedflying Dom 4545m”

First of all I would like to thank Bernhard for traveling with me to swizerland – I was a perfect holiday and increadible adventure!!! We made a very tough expreience of geting up without acclimatization which can end in a quite dangerouse situation in case fast descend isn´t possible. It was hard to turn around without being on the summit but our goal “making the dom” was still in our mind. After 2 days on domhut we achieved a perfect condition to get up dom, breithorn, dofourspitze and nordend – yeah, yeah, yeah!
Finally I have to mention that I hate speedflyers especially in case I have to carry down the fuckin luggage 3200m by walk 🙂 I must say that during descent I was thinking more than once about murdering someone 🙂
Who knows maybe next year I will also take the straight way down….

i would like to say thank you wörn for climbing with such an professional mountaineering men. big respect!
not only the speed is important 😉 more important is the good positive vibratations!
keep it positive thinking!
thx wörn for helping me sometimes to get startet with my speedflyer!
on the steep snow with a lot of wind that is not so easy!!!
you can hate speedflyers! thats up to you! just give it a try and you will get one of the best amazing adrenaline feeling, the world can offer you!!
the straight way is the best way!
so i hope we can do more mountains like that!
bernhard